Leo Laporte’s retirement future in serious doubt

It looks like Leo Laporte, America’s most over-inflated tech balloon, is on the wrong path to retirement freedom—if he ever gets to retire at all.

According to a screengrab from a recent Personal Capital live ad read, Laporte has less than $1 Million in his accounts. That’s according to the service that he allegedly uses to keep track of all his financial data. Falling $10,000 below the million mark means that Laporte will need to keep working well past his golden years if he expects to maintain his current outsized lifestyle for himself and the black-banged moneyhog Lisa.

If these numbers turn out to not include all of his holdings, then Leo is not quite as forthcoming with his audience about how amaaaaaaaazing Personal Capital is as a wealth management tool.

Let’s just hope (for Ozzie’s sake at the very least) that Leo can keep his creaky ship afloat long enough to explain to his audience why they should trust him and his money-tracking tools. Because for us here at #TotalDrama, it just doesn’t add up.

10 thoughts on “Leo Laporte’s retirement future in serious doubt”

I bet this is 100% right, and Leo probably has a million or less in cash.

Now, he likely has $2-$3 million in property, but that’s about it.

I’m certainly no millionaire, so while that sounds like a lot on paper, to rich people who like living like rich people, a million bucks is NOT a lot.

That’s 4 or 5 new cars. That’s 30-40 trips. That’s not even enough to buy a decent sized condo in San Francisco.

I think Leo has mismanaged TWiT’s funds, along with that crazy CEO who has no clue what a CEO or marketing person actually does. I think he’s eyeing on wrapping up the brickhouse experiment and closing up shop in late 2015 or early 2016, and selling off as much as possible. I think he’ll start scaling back to a 4-5 person operation at the most and doing his radio show, along with TWiT, and only Windows Weekly, This Week in Google and MacBreak Weekly.

He’s hoarding all the advertisers so they follow him when TWiT reverts to its original small production setting, and his hopes are probably to do this podcasting thing for another 5 years – until 2020.

But TWiT as it exists today? I bet this brickhouse thing will be coming down within 12-18 months.

It matters not. California is a community property state. If Twit was created while married to Jennifer, she gets half of the profits in perpetuity as well as half of the value. This accounts for the “business trips” which stiffs the wife of those profits. Leo has to spend the money or the wife gets half at the end of the year. Thus these spreadsheets you are looking at are meaningless since the profits of Twit are minimized by design. In fact these graphics may be shown for reasons of obfuscation in case of a future lawsuit…and you are the suckers for buying into it and playing into Leo’s plan. Dummies.

And you can be sure that all the cars are coming out of the company income too as written off as expenses. Lisa is a bookkeeper and knows how this works.

I believe Leo said in the run up to iPad Today, that his net worth is a little less that a million. I guess none of his ‘many friends ‘ let him in on friends and family rounds.

He better figure out a way to monetize TWiT or he is in big trouble. The problem is that TWiT probably has little value – it has an aging host in a competitive market with relatively low barriers to entry, no valuable tangible assets (they don’t own their building), it is not clear that their intangible assets (brand value) are that great.

He loves living large (trips, concerts, sport events, restaurants, top of the like cookware and cutlery…). No wonder he and Lisa lease cars they can’t afford to buy the ones they feel entitled to.

‘Embarrassing’ above is correct about needing about $1.2 million to generate $40K a year. The rule of thumb previously was 4% safe withdrawal rate, based on the Trinity Study, but experts have reduced that in the last few years.

Today on TWIT post show, Soup was talking about going to Morimoto in Napa on a whim and eating A5 Wagu Steak ($25 an Oz, 3 oz minimum). I guess he thinks conspicuous consumption makes him look cool – actually, with some financial context, it makes him look like an idiot.